The Java Champions have nominated and accepted five new members to their group: Jonas Bonér, James Strachan, Rickard Oberg, Régina ten Bruggencate, and Clara Ko. Congratulations, and we look forward to hearing more from each of them!

Jonas Bonér (Sweden) is a Java entrepreneur, programmer, teacher, speaker and author. He is an active contributor to the Open Source community; and most notably created the Akka Project, AspectWerkz Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) framework.

James Strachan (UK) has more than 20 years experience in enterprise software development with a background in finance and middleware and is also committer on a number of open source projects, including Apache Karaf, Maven, Lift and Jersey.

Rickard Oberg (Malaysia) has worked on several Open Source projects that involve JEE development, such as JBoss, XDoclet and WebWork. He has also been the principal architect of the SiteVision CMS/portal platform, where he used AOP as the foundation. Now he works for Jayway, developing the Qi4j framework and Composite Oriented Programming paradigm.

Régina ten Bruggencate (Netherlands) is a senior Java developer for iProfs with 10-plus years of Java experience, mainly on enterprise applications. Régina is the current president of Duchess, and as such has the responsibility for the site and community. Duchess is a global organization for women in Java technology, currently with 350 members in over 50 countries.

Clara Ko (Netherlands) is a freelance Java/J2EE professional living in Amsterdam. She has worked as a developer, architect, and project manager. She promotes the use of open source software and has led initiatives to adopt agile practices across multiple organizations. Clara is also co-founder of Duchess.

The Java Champions are an exclusive group of passionate Java technology and community leaders who are community-nominated and selected under a project sponsored by Oracle. Java Champions get the opportunity to provide feedback, ideas, and direction that will help Oracle grow the Java Platform. This interchange may be in the form of technical discussions and/or community-building activities with Oracle's Java Development and Developer Program teams. Full bios and details about the champions are on http://java-champions.java.net/.